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One of the gifts of living in our current age is that we know more about the physical universe than people have ever known before. And since God knows that’s true, my assumption is that he put us here today — and not 5000 years ago — so we can benefit from this knowledge and the technological advances that follow it.

Take relativity, for instance. Granted… it doesn’t have many home applications. But the theory has been around for over 100 years now, and it is so well verified that I have no problem calling it a law. But what does this do for us Christians? Doesn’t science usually beat us up? No… it does not. In fact, the Law of Relativity gives us a God’s eye view of how the universe works.

People used to think that time was the universe’s constant. But Einstein blew that out of the water. The speed of light is the thing that doesn’t change (… which is interesting in itself because light is such a Godly metaphor). But time, we have learned, can be such a chimera. It changes “relative” to the observer… and I actually use this fact today to answer a question.

A questioner wanted to know “when” specific aspects of our redemption happened in relation to some others… and that’s one of those good questions that doesn’t really matter. (If you are saved, it doesn’t matter if your atonement came at the cross or at the moment when you said yes to Christ.) But I made the decision to attack this through the portal of physics… because like time itself, the answer to this question is relative!

There’s this interesting thing God does in Scripture where he tells us to observe some lesser relationships to learn about our relationship with him. He does this with kings, families and animals, to name a few, but he also gave us one in the book of nature that wasn’t available to anyone before Einstein.

As we approach the speed of light, we have a God-like relationship to less energetic entities… yet our limit is light itself! I see God as giving us a peek at our possibilities with this — but also at our limits — because if we achieved the speed of light, we would also achieve infinite mass.

Now, some of us are closer to achieving infinite mass than are others… but relax. No aspect of the physical universe can actually be infinite…. because no part of the physical universe can actually be God. But the relationships as we approach our limits are still useful and fun to explore.